can a million cigarettes going all at once make smog? maybe, i think.

i am sitting at a computer in my hostel, up earlier than i have been most days this week, and preemptively mourning the end of my stay here. the receptionist is a petite asian woman and she is playing old tracy chapman records on a loop.

homesick is not something i usually am, and is not something i´ve really been since i´ve been here. but yesterday, talking to my mother on the phone and then catching Ellen and Zoe for seconds online, receiving a cousinlove email full of Sageisms like "lateskies," i found my heart gaping for people i love. i didn´t have anyone to talk to about it, so instead i took a long evening stroll through the barri and listened to "Flava in Ya Ear" over and over again, and sat myself in a cerveseria with an Estrella (tall glass, because i am a foreigner, George explained the other night) and got pleasantly buzzed while trying to write an actual poem in my superman notebook.

the thing about Spain is that it was made for hip-hop. it breathes it. the young people flooding the streets with baggy multicolored pants and long dreadlocks and lip rings breathe it, the beach breathes it, Gaudi breathes it, I find myself breathing it while I am here in a way that I haven´t since Amsterdam, when every corner and statue and impassive cozy bar, each glint of light off each canalside centuries-old building bespoke a Tribe or Yungun or Busta song.

then again, maybe Spain was just made for music, in general. the other night i had drinks and a wander around the Raval with the wonderful George, a friend of Paddy´s (the guy who gave me a lift to Cork), and we wound up sitting on his floor eating spaghetti bolognese and listening to folk music at midnight. the folk felt right too, so maybe it is just any music with a heartbeat behind it that is ingrained here. the tracy chapman feels right, and the cheery acoustic flamenco cover of Gorillaz´"Clint Eastwood" that also stays on hearty rotation here on Carrer dels Vitagans.

walking me home to the hostel, running over "Devil´s Pie" in my head, we passed through an oblong dirt plaza ringed with bejeweled white-lit palm trees. i realized that i had passed through it before, almost two years ago, with Andrew and Ben, had taken an impossibly blurry photo and maintained a much sharper mental image that would remain synonymous with that visit.

it is good to be here. in Spain, it feels perfectly responsible to eat innumerable bread-and-chorizo meals on the beach and to ignore the loom of Big Decisions, about taking care of myself and how best to do that, about Buffalo and how long to stay there, about Seattle and Zoe and Alia, about how to fill the wide heart-holes that have been growing the whole time I have been at home.

in the new year, i will think about the Big Decisions.